Mother by Fate. Tara Quinn Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ take money out of his account. And he couldn’t see hers at all. But she was able to transfer funds to his account at any time.

      Her alimony payments went through the court. And unless he married, they would continue to do so for another seven years.

      “Thanks, Sara.” Jason’s tone was congenial now. As if they were old friends. All the tension had left his voice. As it always did. No matter how much of a scum he’d just been. Asking for money. Or having sex behind his wife’s back. He was Jason. He was entitled.

      “How is she?” Sara asked. He was going to hang up.

      “Good. Real good.”

      “How did she do with the swimming lessons?”

      “It was rough at first. You know how she hates having her head underwater...”

      She had at two. That could have changed.

      “But in the end, she was swimming like a fish.”

      “Underwater?”

      “Not as easily, but yeah.”

      Sara smiled. Bessie was one determined little girl. She was proud of her.

      “So, yeah, I hate to cut you off, but I gotta go, Sara, I have to...”

      Sara might have forced him to talk to her a little longer—after all, she hadn’t transferred the money yet—but her phone buzzed with an incoming call.

      “I do, too. Bye,” she said to her ex, and clicked over to take the other call.

      “Lila, what’s up?” The managing director of the Lemonade Stand, the unique, privately funded women’s shelter where Sara worked, didn’t ever call her at home just to chat. “It’s Nicole. She’s gone.”

      “What do you mean gone? She left?” Dropping her towel, Sara reached for the closest pair of cotton pants she had. With the phone propped between her shoulder and her ear, she slipped into underwear and then her pants. “It doesn’t make sense,” she said, buttoning the pants with fingers that fumbled in her haste. “Why would she go? She’s not safe and... She called someone and got word that her son was being moved, didn’t she?”

      It was the sole reason the woman would leave the only place where she was safe. Where her secrets were safe.

      “She made a call,” Lila confirmed. “But no, she told one of the girls that Toby hadn’t been moved yet.”

      There was a neighbor in LA across the street from where Nicole had lived with her husband and son, an older woman Nicole’s ex didn’t even notice, who’d been keeping an eye on things for Nicole. Specifically on her son. Because Trevor, Toby’s father, a white-supremacist higher-up in a national neo-Nazi organization was going to run with him. Nicole knew it. Now the police knew it. And if he did run, the woman would never see her son again. Worse, the boy would have little chance but to be indoctrinated by the man who’d spawned him for one purpose only. To populate the world with white men who hated anyone who wasn’t a white man.

      White men who believed that ridding the earth of nonwhites was their God-given purpose.

      If Nicole didn’t get Toby away, the boy would most likely grow up to be just like his dad. As Trevor had done before him.

      Sara had a bra on and was in the process of pulling a short-sleeved cotton top over her head. “She wouldn’t leave,” she said. “Not without Toby.”

      Late the night before, the Santa Raquel police had promised Nicole they’d get her son out of Trevor’s house and into safe custody, after the LA Police Department had withdrawn the warrant that had been issued for her arrest. A child-welfare representative, a member of the High Risk Team, had already been briefed and was waiting for Toby to arrive in Santa Raquel.

      “She left,” Lila said, her voice unusually agitated. “She was at the thrift shop, looking for some jeans...” All they’d had in the on-campus store were women’s sizes. Nicole, who was twenty-seven years old and five foot two, barely weighed a hundred pounds. “And then she was gone. Out the side door where we empty the trash...”

      The thrift shop, one of the many businesses operated by the Lemonade Stand that were open to the public and provided the shelter’s primary means of support, fronted an open city street. Residents accessed it through a back exit, and from there the only admittance to the locked grounds of the Stand was via fingerprint recognition.

      A new safety measure that had been instigated over the summer as part of the work the High Risk Team was doing.

      “She got spooked,” Sara said, slipping into a pair of light blue flats, then slinging her bag over her shoulder before heading out the door. “Dammit, someone was there. Someone scared her into running.”

      “From what we heard last night, if Trevor gets hold of her she’s as good as dead.”

      “And then he has Toby all to himself,” Sara said. “You’ve already alerted everyone...”

      “Of course.”

      “I’m on my way.”

      “Good.”

      Sara and Lila, in these jobs they worked together, had seen more ugliness than most people ever would. Lila always appeared to handle it all calmly.

      With only the briefest shrug of disappointment about the fact that she wouldn’t have been able to have her dinner date with Hot Pool Guy that night, Sara drove carefully, but over the speed limit to the Lemonade Stand. There wasn’t much she could do at this point, but maybe there would be. Once she talked with some of the women. They might relax and open up to her more easily than they would with a member of law enforcement. Maybe one of them saw something that would give them a clue as to where Nicole had gone.

      A direction even.

      Regardless, Sara needed to be at the Stand.

      Because just as Lila leaned on her, she leaned on Lila, too.

      They were two strong women, caring for victims to the best of their ability.

      And though they never spoke of their personal lives with each other, they both seemed to understand, without having to say as much, that they were two women with secrets of their own.

       CHAPTER THREE

      MICHAEL WAS GOOD at what he did. In just a few short years he’d become one of the top ten bounty hunters in the country. And while Michael had bills to pay, he didn’t hunt criminals to make a living. He hunted them strictly to save innocent lives.

      He’d brought in the head of a Mexican drug cartel for a sum that would have kept him and Mari clothed and fed for more than a year if he’d chosen to stop working.

      A tiny bitch of a woman wasn’t going to get away from him.

      She was good, though. Her ex-husband, when he’d gone to the guy to find out what he could about the woman listed on the warrant he’d been given, told him she’d been hunted before.

      Trevor СКАЧАТЬ